Wilfred Owen's "dulce et decorum est" draws its title from the works of the Roman poet Horace, and the understanding of this poem hinges upon knowing the meaning of the Latin. Translated, the finale of the poem reads "He is sweet and noble, who dies for his country." One is tempted to quote George Patton in response to this, but still the phrase remains, and it his final stanza sums up the point of the poem; that death for ones country is neither sweet nor noble, but sickening and painful.

Visually, there are a few points that aid this idea. If divided into quatrains, the poem would maintain a constant abab rhyme scheme within each quatrain (except for the deviation in quatrain six). However, Owen does not visually divide his poem into neat quatrains. Rather, the initial two quatrains, when men still push forward in drudgery, maintain their distinctness, creating a feeling of steady, mindless regularity. With the third quatrain he breaks that rhythm, in keeping with what is happening in the poem.

The third quatrain creates a sense of urgency by partially merging on the page with the fourth. This speeds up the rhythm of the piece by forcing six lines into the space which would be occupied by a quatrain in the previous rhythm. The caesura between lines of two and three of the fourth quatrain serves to break up that quatrain, evoking a sense of the confusion of battle, without actually losing the reader.

Similarly, what would be the sixth quatrain contains the only variation from the rhyme scheme by breaking a full line as "Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud" into two half lines and switching their order. Again, the breaking of the previously established rhythm and the use of line breaks gives emphasis to the words; bitterness and obscenity come to the fore, the poet having drawn our attention to them forcefully, rather than allowing us to slip into a rhythm in the poem and miss them.

Superceding the rhythmic concerns of the poem, however, are the words themselves. Each word seems chosen for its negative connotations; men, who a poet supporting the lie of dulce et decorum… would have described these men in heroic terms, are described as "beggars" or "hags". Owen shows the horror of a man who falls to the gas, rather than just the sanitized appearance of gas around men safe from its effects.

Also telling is the lack of a motive for any of the acts in the poem; men are not said to be patriots or heroes, and gas shells simply fall; nothing is tied to anything beyond the moment. This adds, in part, to the drudgery and routine that are evoked by the first two stanzas of the poem, but also to strip this episode of any patriotic motives. These men seek only to survive, not fight some enemy that seems to exist only as gas shells within the poem.

The most telling verbal cue, however, comes in the last four lines of the poem, where we find a true sense of cynicism towards the idea of dulce et decorum…. Of course, the third of the four lines' use of the word "lie" to describe the statement is a simple and obvious clue, but less obvious ones are present. The use of the words "with such high zest" implies that once the sentiment of dulce et decorum… was once held by either the speaker or the dead man who he now sees on the wagon. If neither had held that view, the word "such" becomes superfluous; it does not refer one to a behavioral antecedent. In the second of the four lines, the words "children" and "desperate" further adds to the sense of cynicism. "Children" implies that young men striving for glory are not aware of the truth of what they want, much like children don't understand all the consequences of their actions. "Desperate" furthers the idea that they don't know what they want; they wish for something and in their ignorance reach for something dangerous.

When combined, the two synergistically form an impression of pain, tedium, and occasional bursts of fearful activity. There is no glory in shown in the words, but rather a sense of despair and loss, as well as a slight tinge of cynicism towards the patriotic ideals that the speaker in the poem once held. The rhythmic and verbal cues combine to show the horror of war, and lay bare what the speaker sees as